121–130 of 147 posts
This was an interesting thread to read as a Malawian living right here in Malawi and frustrated about our situation. As the article mentions, we have a lot of things going for us that should have us in a better situation - very few natural disasters, no wars/civil unrest, even though the rains are sketchy sometimes we generally have good rainfall and even though we have challenges with food sometimes, it's rare to he…
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Swedish speakers in Finland are not immigrants anymore than Dutch speakers in Belgium are, though (the Dutch speaking area also generally does better than the French speaking areas, for a variety of reasons).
it is interesting to note that since the industrial revolution it was the french speaking part of belgium that flourished due to its steel industry, and the dutch speaking part was the poor one. only when the steel industry stopped being competitive the economy switched away from industry to service where the french part stagnated and the dutch part started to flourish, so clearly who does better has nothing to do wi…
Saying language had no influence on who did better is inaccurate.
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Foreign aid is rarely a gift - in almost all cases it is a business transaction. It is given as a loan, or in return for some mineral rights, or for an important UN vote, or for allegiance in a war. For the loan cases, the terms are often unaffordable, effectively handing effective control of the entire country to the entity who has the other end of the loan - it is the modern empire-by-debt.
No. A lot of foreign aid is direct things like food, medicine, doctors, AIDS prevention programmes, vaccines for specific things, maternal care, containment of an Ebola epidemic, etc. Do you really think that e.g. Kenya is voting alongside EU members because the EU paid for a part of a highway between two cities in Kenya? Then yes, there are loans and grants for infrastructure things. > For the loan cases, the terms…
I'm honestly disheartened by how much HN has degraded into Reddit now.
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Immigrants to any country are a unique slice of the population because they chose to migrate for a better life. Hence immigrants in most countries tend to do well economically (sometimes after a generation). Uncertain that cultural differences are the reason for different economic outcomes you observe.
Swedish speakers in Finland are not immigrants anymore than Dutch speakers in Belgium are, though (the Dutch speaking area also generally does better than the French speaking areas, for a variety of reasons).
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Could it be that they haven't been so infected by the money bug that for now they still have a society oriented around happiness and maintaining traditional ways of life rather than economic attainment?
Would you want to live there?
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No. A lot of foreign aid is direct things like food, medicine, doctors, AIDS prevention programmes, vaccines for specific things, maternal care, containment of an Ebola epidemic, etc. Do you really think that e.g. Kenya is voting alongside EU members because the EU paid for a part of a highway between two cities in Kenya? Then yes, there are loans and grants for infrastructure things. > For the loan cases, the terms…
Sadly you got downvoted to oblivion but you are absolutely correct. I'm honestly disheartened by how much HN has degraded into Reddit now.
Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.Earlier quoted context omitted.
it is interesting to note that since the industrial revolution it was the french speaking part of belgium that flourished due to its steel industry, and the dutch speaking part was the poor one. only when the steel industry stopped being competitive the economy switched away from industry to service where the french part stagnated and the dutch part started to flourish, so clearly who does better has nothing to do wi…
There was significant repression on the Dutch language in Belgium not long ago. There was no Dutch university prior to 1930s and courts were solely in french for a long time.To this date there's still some Bruxellois who'll call you Sale Flamand (dirty Fleming) if you speak Dutch in the capital city. It is however way better now than 50+ years ago, my grandfather got beat up for speaking Dutch. Saying language had no…
but what i meant to say is that language does not have an influence in an absolute sense in that say dutch speakers would always do better than french speakers or something like that because of the language somehow giving them an advantage. the advantage comes from being part of the group that is in power.
The thing is, most of Africa has been by default poor and dysfunctional for quite a while. A big factor is that a lot of Africans have been subsistence farmers for a long time [1]. A substance might actually be comfortable in some circumstances but they are outside the money since they produce the food and materials they need for survival (so they can live on "pennies a day"). However, the tendency in many third world nations has been that the arrival of Western medicine allowed substance farmers to have the ten-child families they imagine will make them rich and the result is acute poverty. Moreover, when most people are substance farmers, the elites/state/etc tend to gain their wealth through rent-seeking, squeezing the majority, rather than enterprise.
Development, which is honestly capitalist development, requires workers willing to leave their family farms and work for wages on things the world market needs. Elites have to be willing and able to profit from people leaving traditional agriculture rather than profiting from traditional agriculture. By this, the Rwandan genocide (sadly) was a logical event setting the stage for development (especially since a minority of the educated elites came, exacted some revenge and set to work ruling the country). The Black Death and the Enclosures were both important development
[1] Now, it should be note that so much Africa was subsistence farming by the 19th because the earlier slave/gun trade allowed the "Slave States" within Africa to wipe out many more organized/less cleptocratic societies.
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Finnish GDP per capita is growing much, much faster than Malawi's: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?locat...
This is not accurate, because it's not adjusted for inflation. There hasn't been real GDP growth in Finland for 20 years. This is more accurate comparison: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.KD?end=2...